


Calculated Space

by 27noir



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Dissociation, M/M, mario cart as therapy, post winter soldier, vague mention that Bucky and Nat knew each other in the past
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:18:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22150144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/27noir/pseuds/27noir
Summary: The person on the bed stares at him through Bucky’s eyes, and says, “I’m what they left behind.”
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 7
Kudos: 45





	Calculated Space

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic right after seeing Winter Soldier in theaters and didn't finish it until last year, WHOOPS. 
> 
> Thanks to B for the beta

In the end, Steve doesn’t have to look very hard. What he expected to be long and arduous is as simple as opening door.

He’s been out for a run with Sam and steps into his new apartment. It’s been months since his last one was destroyed and he still hasn’t managed to rid this one of it’s stark and glossy un-lived-in feel yet, but he crosses the threshold and something feels _off_ _._ He doesn’t know it’s Bucky, not till the open window and even then, when he follows the obvious trail down to the bedroom, he doesn’t know it’s really Bucky until he sees him curled up awkwardly on top of the bed.

Steve stands in the doorway, hand on the knob, and watches him, his heart pounding and wondering if he should wake him.

But Bucky isn’t asleep, as dark, tired eyes peer at him over where his arm is curled defensively around head. Sunlight glints off the metal, and Steve frowns.

“Buck?” he says softly. “Bucky, is that you?”

The figure on the bed unfurls slowly, blinking at him.

“That’s what you used to call him…”

“Yeah, that’s what I call you,” Steve says. “Bucky. You’re Bucky—James Buchanan—

“—Barnes. I know. That’s what I used to be.”

Bucky’s voice is rough and low and Steve’s heart drops. 

“You’re not the Winter Soldier—you’re still Bucky, you’re still my friend. You are not what they made you.”

But he stops at the look in Bucky’s eyes, and he wonders if it’s the truth, that he’s still Bucky. His eyes are cold and dark—vast, like empty space.

“The Winter Soldier didn’t finish the mission so is as good as dead,” Bucky says. “And James Buchanan Barnes died long ago.”

Steve flinches, because he still remembers watching Bucky fall. It wasn’t all that long ago, really. He thought Bucky had died then, too.

_So who am I talking to?_ He wonders.

The person on the bed stares at him through Bucky’s eyes, and says, “I’m what they left behind.”

The Ghost sleeps, but it feels like the second he closes his eyes terror grips him at his throat, catching the screams that build up there.

His dreams are drenched in blood. He sees them, one by one, these people he has killed. The Winter Soldier killed them. The Asset killed them. James Buchanan Barnes even killed some of them—he was good with a gun back then too. Every death at his hands has been fused in his brain and they come back in his dreams to drag him down with them.

There are others too. His _handlers_. The ones he wishes now he had killed, even as they push him back into the chair and lock him down. He doesn’t fight—god, he wants to fight, he wants to _scream_ —knowing it will only be worse if he does. He can’t move his hands. They shove something between his teeth. There’s a pulse and lights and _pain_ —

Somewhere near by someone is shouting a name. Over and over again. _Bucky. Bucky!_ James Buchanan Barnes thinks, _That’s me._ _That’s my name._

The Ghost wakes.

Steve Rogers is pinned under his metal hand, smashed awkwardly against the footboard and the Winter Soldier’s fingers diligently at his throat. Rogers—Steve— _Rogers—_ is not fighting and it takes a moment for the Ghost to realize that he’s barely putting any pressure there. He’s just holding him down. He’s not trying to kill him.

“Bucky,” Rogers breaths. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

The Ghost wonders how many nights of waking like this it would take before the Ghost’s insanity broke the softness of his voice.

(James Buchanan Barnes tells him that that would never happen. That Steve’s ability to put up with Bucky Barnes’ shit has a long and glorious history. Like when Bucky had fucked up and forgotten to pay the electrical bill just that one time and they spent the weekend in the dark and freezing cold, Steve coughing nearly continually and Bucky swearing at every goddamn thing because he was so disappointed in himself. Steve was on death’s doorstep and he just smiled and told Bucky everything was okay, voice soft then too.)

It takes a moment, then two, but the Ghost moves away, retreating to the other end of the bed. He stares down at his hands, one glinting in the dim light.

“I thought they were going to wipe me,” he says after a long moment. Rogers sits beside him on the bed, down at the end, just out of both of their reach.

“No one’s going to wipe you again,” Rogers says fiercely. “No one’s going to hurt you. Not this time.”

The Ghost looks at him, studies him, calculates the angles of his features. He looks away.

“You can’t promise that.”

Rogers is silent. Then he says softly, “Even still, I’m with you until the end of the line.”

Like those words are supposed to mean something to the Ghost.

Steve can’t lie to Natasha when she calls. He doesn’t have to. His lack of answer tells her the truth. She agrees not to tell the others, not at least until she’s seen him herself.

“Natalia,” Bucky breaths when he sees her and the softness in his voice twists in Steve’s gut. This is the first time he has heard that sort of emotion—any emotion really—from Bucky since he showed up.

Bucky drops into rapid Russian, saying more than he has in the last few days in one verbal outpour. But Natasha cuts him off with a quick raise of her hand and a few sharp, but not unkind, words. These too are in Russian, and Steve thinks he will take her up on lessons sooner rather than later.

They stare at each other. There is something in Natasha’s face that Steve doesn’t see very often. Regret, perhaps. He can’t quite place it. Regardless, he wonders how much she hasn’t told him about her involvement with The Winter Soldier. 

The look on Bucky’s face is easy to read: longing and loss. Steve knows that one well.

Natasha breaks eye contact, sighing just slightly. She steps forward and reaches out to touch Bucky lightly on the side of the face. Steve tenses, expecting Bucky to lash out at her for it (though he hates that he assumes that) but Bucky doesn’t move except to lean into her touch.

“Do you know who you are?” She asks quietly, eyes searching his.

Bucky frowns. “I’m the Ghost,” he says, like this is obvious. “The shell casing of both James Buchanan Barnes and the Winter Soldier. They carved one out to fit the other. But the Winter Soldier didn’t finish his mission, so he is dead too. I am the husk that remains.”

Natasha looks pained.

There is an uneasy silence.

“Will you tell the others about this?” Steve asks when it gets to be too much. Natasha finally drops her hand as she turns to look at him.

“Do you want me to?”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” Steve admits. He’ll tell Sam, but he’s wary of Tony’s involvement right now. Steve can see him more fascinated with Bucky’s arm than with respecting his space. He’s not sure the other’s will care, though.

But Natasha nods, lips pressed into a tight smile. “I’ll throw Tony off the trail for as long as I can.”

Steve sighs in relief. “Thank you.”

She turns back to Bucky and smiles. “He’s a good guy,” she says to him. “Try not to cause him too much trouble.” She leans in to kiss his forehead, and Bucky lets her like it’s a familiar gesture.

James Buchanan Barnes ( _Bucky_ ) get his memories back in flashes and instances, all scattered in seemingly meaningless triggers.

Example: Rogers is sitting at the table in the kitchen, flicking through files on his tablet when the Ghost comes in. This is not by any means a familiar picture to him. But the way the light hits Rogers as he sits at the table sparks something in Barnes’ memory and there it is—

_Steve, when he was still small and gangly, sitting at the table with its mismatched chairs in the apartment they shared before the war. He has a pencil in hand and is staring down intently at his sketchbook. There’s light streaming in from the window behind him and Bucky hears his own voice, light and teasing, pestering Steve to come out with him tonight for once. Steve looks up, hair alight in the sunshine and Bucky isn’t sure if it’s that or Steve’s smile that has his breath caught in this throat. Steve just shakes his head and Bucky’s about to try to persuade him—_

And then it’s gone. And the Ghost feels cold again, the warmth of the memory lost. He tries to pull it back—that warmth—and though he can bring back the images, play them on command, it just makes him feel more disoriented.

If he thought remembering what James Buchanan Barnes once was would bridge the gap, make him whole, he was wrong. If anything, it makes the dissociation worse. But it is nothing like remembering what the Winter Soldier was. What _he_ did.

It disturbs Barnes—it disturbs the Ghost too—and each night he wakes trying to remember how to breathe because they are forcing him to cold sleep again or strapping him into the machine to wipe him or he’s in the midst of completing a mission, hands around the throat of some man, woman or child.

He doesn’t wake up screaming, not every night, but his thrashing wakes Rogers even the first couple of nights when he went to sleep on the couch down the hall. Now Rogers camps out beside him on the floor of the bedroom (the bed is too fucking soft, even Rogers agrees), an estimated perfect distance from the Ghost. Some calculated equation of what Rogers believes to be a respectable distance to sleep beside one’s best friend who came back from the dead and is probably certifiably insane.

He must be screaming this night, because Rogers is awake beside him in an instant as he clutches his chest, trying to breath.

“Buck! Bucky, it’s okay. It’s okay!”

_No it’s not!_ He wants to yell, because everything is so wrong. He doesn’t know who he is anymore, doesn’t know who he’s supposed to be, after so much death and pain. Nothing is okay, and it hasn’t been for so long, not since Zola’s lab and—

And maybe he’s been blathering this all out loud because it’s silence when he takes a sharp breath as Roger’s puts a hand on the back of his neck. It’s firm and warm and it pulls the Ghost to Roger’s chest.

“It’s going to be okay,” Rogers says. “You’re right, everything’s fucked up right now, but it’s going to be okay. We’re going to make it okay.”

The Ghost is too startled by the contact to disagree. Rogers is warm—hot even—and he realizes he’s been so cold for so long. He curls his fingers, metal and flesh, into the fabric of Rogers’ shirt and presses his face to the crook of his neck, longing for that warmth. Rogers stills, then wraps his arms around him.

They don’t say anything for what feels like a long time.

“You’re still Bucky,” Rogers says at last. “You’re still m— You’re still Bucky.”

“I don’t remember,” he says, because he doesn’t, not all of it. Not enough.

“I can tell you.” 

So Steve tells him. He recounts every story he can remember—how they met, how they lived before the war. He talks of his mom, and Bucky’s parents, and the girls Bucky used to date. He talks about their classmates and neighbors and the soldiers they fought with. He tells Bucky about their childhoods and the war, and of the countless times Bucky saved him in a fight.

He’s startled when Bucky hands him a battered black notebook one day.

“This is what I remember,” Bucky says and he walks away.

Steve reads every page, though it breaks his heart. Most of it is a hit list, short distinct recollections of the people Bucky has killed, as the Winter Soldier or otherwise. Filtered in between are nightmares of abuse—Zola, Hydra, the KGB. Of being wiped, of being programmed, of cryo.

Bucky remembers few things from before he fell—three entries in a notebook full of atrocities: Steve drawing at the table in their apartment before the war, hair aglow in the afternoon sun; Waking up in Zola’s lab, Steve looming over him, sure he’s dreaming— _I thought you were smaller. I really thought you were smaller…;_ And the day of Steve’s mother’s funeral.

_I’m with you till the end of the line._

He finds Bucky on the floor of the bedroom, curled into a ball, metal fingers tight around the back of his skull. Steve sits beside him and puts a hand on his shoulder. Bucky flinches.

“I meant it,” Steve says. “’Til the end of the line, Buck.”

A moment, then two, and Bucky exhales and the tension leaves his frame, though he doesn’t uncurl.

_Because I love you,_ Steve thinks, but doesn’t say.

The calculated space between them changes. Steve hovered before, but now he’s always close at hand. Not necessarily touching but near enough that if the Ghost needs him he doesn’t have to reach far.

He still has trouble thinking of himself as _Bucky_. He wants to though, if only to please the earnest sound of Steve calling him that. He wants to make Steve happy. As foreign as that thought is, it’s also somehow this deep seated desire that he almost doesn’t remember being without it.

James Buchanan Barnes wanted to make Steve happy, he knows. It might have been the only thing he wanted. Everything he did, the Ghost realizes, was for Steve. Even going to war. He wanted to keep Steve safe and free.

It’s easy to see why. Steve might tower over him now, and is just as broad, but he’s still Steve, to his core. He’s still kind and honest and willing fight for what he believes in. These things he remembers.

And when he wakes from nightmares now—these terrible things that he thinks will always haunt him—he expects Steve to be there to catch him. And every time he is.

Natalia shows up one day with a box of gadgetry which she starts plugging into Steve’s TV. Steve leaves to go for a run with Sam, so it’s just Natalia—or Natasha as Steve calls her—and the Ghost, who is suspicious of the wires and controllers Natasha is fiddling with. He’s not good with technology—too much of his experience with it resulted in pain or death—but Steve’s been showing him how to use the tablet and the internet so he’s learning that new tech can mean things like pictures of cats and library access so he’s trying to be open minded.

Eventually Natasha hands him a controller. “I’m going to teach you how to play Mario Kart,” she says with a grin as the screen starts to display bold colors and emit almost obnoxiously chipper music.

She explains the basics—(“It’s called a video game, Barnes. You race your friends in little cars. It’s fun.”)—and what the buttons do. The game and the controls are a bit infuriating, and he has his ass handed to him several time before he sneaks in a close third to Natasha’s streak of firsts.

They play for a several hours, something he is only aware of when Steve comes back from what is a suspiciously long run and the Ghost looks at the time.

“You’re still playing Mario Kart?” Steve asks. He sounds a little disappointed. But Natasha just raises her eyebrows in a perfect arch, still focused on the game.

“Yes, and Barnes is about to beat me, finally.”

She’s right, he takes first place for the first time, and her mouth twitches into a smile. Steve just frowns.

She tilts her head back over the couch and scrutinizes him. “Don’t push it, Rogers. We’re getting there.” She hands him a controller. “Now get over here and play with us.”

Steve sighs, take a controller and sits down. Bucky manages a close first when Natasha finally puts her controller aside.

“Looks like I’ve finally got some competition.” She smiles at the Ghost. “Steve’s no good.”

And then she quietly and gracefully shows herself out.

Steve sighs.

“She’s right,” the Ghost says. “You’re no good.”

Steve huffs. “I see you’ve mastered it already.” He gives him a lopsided smile.

The Ghost stares at him. “What was that about?

“What?” Steve looks genuinely surprised.

“With Natalia—Natasha. And the video game. And you running with Sam for three hours.”

Steve stares back at him, then his shoulders sag and he rubs the back of his neck, not looking at him.

“I just thought that maybe you’d want to talk to someone about things—about the things that have happened. And that it might be good if you did. You and Nat seemed to have some sort of familiarity, so I thought—“

The Ghost stares at him, then at the TV which is still displaying the results from the last race.

“I’m sorry, Buck, I should have told you.”

The Ghost doesn’t say anything. Then he gets up and hands Steve his controller.

“Tell Natalia she can come play whenever she wants,” he says and he leaves the room.

It’s so gradual that Steve doesn’t see it until it happens. And all it is is a touch—a brush of fingers against skin—but it’s a spark to tinder and it changes everything.

It changes nothing.

Steve’s loved Bucky for as long as he can remember. When there was nothing else, there was always Bucky. And it made things awkward from time to time—always making excuses not to go out on double dates and trying to calculate the right amount of space to leave between them. Especially when all Steve wanted to do was press himself to Bucky’s chest and stay there. Instead Steve watched Bucky go off with girl after girl while kept his distance.

Nothing changed Steve’s feelings for Bucky—not the serum, not the war, not Bucky’s fall. Even Bucky back from the dead as Hydra’s war machine, Steve still loved him. Steve will always love him.

Till the end of the line, remember?

And even if he hoped—and oh, how he hoped—he never expected anything of Bucky. So it came as no surprise that Bucky showed no signs of reciprocation. It still doesn’t.

When Natasha comes to play video games, Steve goes for runs with Sam. He doesn’t ask, though he wants to, and Bucky remains as closed off as ever. Except, sometimes when Steve tells him stories of their past ,Bucky will fill in small innocuous details—(Her name was Nancy. It was a Tuesday.)—and there are times when his face doesn’t seem so blank and pained. He even voiced an opinion about dinner, after weeks of eating like an automaton.

So maybe it shouldn’t come as a surprise.

They are sitting side by side on the couch one night. Nat just left after trouncing them both at Mario Kart again, but they’re still playing another round. Bucky wins and Steve smiles, about to make some comment about his victory when Bucky sighs and leans back against the couch. His hand fall to his side, right beside Steve’s own.

“Is it always this exhausting?” Bucky asks softly.

Before Steve can muster some response, Bucky gives him something that might have been a smile if weren’t so full of sadness and taps his knuckles to the back of Steve’s hand, a light touch, and says abstractly, “Thank you.”

“Buck,” he manages, though his brain is sputtering to a halt. He can still feel the soft touch of skin against skin and suddenly he wants nothing more than to press himself to Bucky’s chest once again.

But all Bucky says is, “I’m going to go to bed,” and get up off the couch.

Steve stares after him, the tremulous wave of emotions washing over him. When he finally joins Bucky on the bedroom floor, Bucky’s already asleep. Steve lays down and aches for the distance between them.

If Bucky— _Bucky, Bucky, Bucky,_ he’s still trying to get used to it, still trying it on for size—notices a change it’s in this: whenever they touch now, Steve acts like he’s been shocked. He tries to hide it, but Steve’s never been good at hiding or lying. Especially to Bucky, James Buchanan Barns tells him.

It’s a bit unsettling and Bucky doesn’t know what caused it. Then he wonders if maybe they just never touched before, his night terrors not included. Maybe he just dreamed they did.

And he does dream about that. He dreams of slinging his arm over Steve’s shoulders and pulling him in tight to his side. He dreams of grabbing his hand to pull him up off the ground after he got himself into _another_ fight. He dreams about clapping him on the back and saying that promise. He doesn’t know if they are memories turned dreams or dreams turned memories.

(Worse, he dreams of skin against skin, and he _really_ doesn’t know what to make of those. Especially when he wakes up panting and just as panicked as some of his other dreams and Steve is there as he always is to hold him until he breathes easy again. He doesn’t know if he wants to act on them or to make them go away entirely.)

So Steve jolts when they touch and Bucky is so, so confused. Because it feels like Steve doesn’t like it, even the accidental brush of skin, but he looks at Bucky with such longing and Bucky doesn’t know what Steve _wants_.

Natasha raises an eyebrow at their behavior when she comes over and Steve seemingly forgets that touching Bucky is distasteful, pats him on his bare shoulder. He immediately regrets it, pulling back with a start and a panicked look. There’s an odd silence before he bows out of the apartment and Bucky sinks into the couch with a huff. 

“How long has that been going on?” she asks as she hands him a controller. Bucky just makes a noise of discontentment.

This is how they talk now—Mario Kart is always there as a way out, a break, a distraction, but they talk while they play now. Natasha started it, with simple one sided conversations about the KGB and getting out. About what they made her do. About Shield and Hydra and making friends with Steve and Sam. She didn’t seem to care that Bucky didn’t respond, she just talked while they played, until one the day Bucky said, “I killed the Starks.”

Natasha only nodded, eyes intent on the game, and waited. So Bucky started with that, that job and how he wondered how Steve feels about it. How it felt like he wasn’t in his body, though he knows he did all of it. A lot of the jobs are like that—that split-self memory. It was him but it wasn’t but it was but it wasn’t—looping over and over. Natasha had listened, the right amount of sympathetic and still willing to crush him in the game, and at the end she smiled at him and patted his knee before she left.

It didn’t feel like much then, and it still doesn’t now, but Bucky’s chest doesn’t feel so tight all of the time, so maybe it is something.

Now though, right now, in this moment after Steve had flinched away from him yet again, his chest is very tight.

“I don’t understand what he wants.”

He doesn’t mean to say it. Natasha frowns beside him, even though she just lapped him in the game, and Bucky just keeps talking, surprising himself.

“Sometimes he looks at me… he looks at me like there’s nothing else. Like he’s lost something and found it in me. But every time he touches me lately it’s like I’ve shocked him. And I don’t _understand_. I don’t know what he wants.”

Bucky can see the smile pulling at the corners of Natasha’s lips and he frowns.

“What to _you_ want?” she asks and Bucky starts, surprised. But he thinks about it for a moment.

“I don’t know,” he says.

“Maybe Steve doesn’t know either.”

_Oh_ , he thinks.

“Maybe Steve is confused or scared or worried, and it’s manifesting in such conflicting behavior. You could ask him, you know,” she adds with a smile.

Bucky doesn’t say anything for the rest of the time she’s there, in quiet consideration, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She kisses him on the cheek when she leaves and Bucky goes to bed thinking, _what do I want?_

Steve’s just back from a run with Sam, downing a glass of water in the kitchen when he hears Bucky shift in behind him.

“Good run?” Bucky asks, slinking further in but still not as close as Steve wants these days. Steve nods. Natasha was already gone when he came back and Bucky’d been his usual quiet since.

He seems serious now, eyebrows knit and gaze strange. Steve leans back against the counter, about to ask if he’s okay—something he usually avoids because Bucky’s generally not okay—when Bucky says his name.

“Steve,” he says again. “What do you want?”

Steve blinks, not sure what he’s asking—and then Bucky’s stepping close, crowding Steve back, hands flat against the counter on either side of Steve’s hips. He’s having trouble breathing suddenly, with Bucky so close.

Bucky’s staring up at him, the question still in his eyes. _What do you want?_ He looks more confused than predatory, even though he has Steve pinned. Steve bites his lip, nervous though not sure why, and tries not to flush as he watches Bucky’s eyes focus on his mouth as he does so.

Bucky’s gaze flicks back up to Steve’s eyes, and maybe there’s some hesitation there, but what he says holds no quarter.

“Do you want to kiss me?”

Bucky doesn’t give him a chance to answer, just kisses him.

Everything freezes. Steve can’t move—at least, he thinks he can’t. Maybe it’s just his brain that’s stalled because his hands sliding into Bucky’s hair. And his lips aren’t still against Bucky’s, he’s kissing him back. Steve’s pulling him closer even as Bucky pushes him further against the counter so that their bodies are flush and Steve can feel the heat though Bucky’s shirt.

When they pull away, Steve’s breathing harder than any run, heart hammering. Maybe it’s loud enough that Bucky hears it, because he places his hand over Steve’s heart, almost as if to calm it.

“I wanted to do that,” Bucky says, and lets out a puff of air. “James— _I’ve_ wanted to do that for a while now.”

Their eyes meet. There’s a softness in Bucky’s face that Steve hasn’t seen since before he fell, and it feels like something cracks in his chest. Something breaks.

Steve’s hands are still tangled in Bucky’s loose hair and he pulls him back in. Bucky presses back against him and Steve thinks, _This is what I want. This is what I’ve wanted since forever. This, this, this._

Bucky stands in the kitchen, his body pressed against Steve’s, his hands on Steve’s hips and Steve’s fingers tightening in his hair and thinks, _You were a fool James Buchanan Barnes._

James loved Steve, of course James loved him, but Bucky doesn’t really think that he really got what that meant. Or maybe he was just scared. Either way, James wasted years, all those years they had together, not doing this. They should have always been doing this.

Especially when Steve says his name in a breathy exhale and, “This is what I’ve wanted since forever.” Bucky thinks maybe he didn’t meant to say it out loud, but Bucky’s glad he did. He tries to pull him closer, to remove whatever space is left between them, and Steve’s doing the same, pressing out the atoms that might stand between them and _this._

Steve says his name again, an almost question. _Yes, yes, yes,_ Bucky thinks, but Steve stills in his arms and he forces himself to do the same. Steve presses his forehead to Bucky’s, hands cradling Bucky’s face and out of breath. But he’s _smiling_. Steve’s smiling like he got everything he ever wanted. And it takes everything in Bucky not to kiss him again.

Instead he just looks at him, looks Steve straight in the eye, and says, “I am Bucky Barnes, and I’m with you till the end of the line, Steve Rogers.”

Steve’s eyes go wide. Then he huffs a laugh. He presses their noses together, utter joy on his face. “I love you, Buck. I should have said it a long time ago maybe, but I love you.”

Bucky smiles a that. It might be first smile since forever, but even with all the hurt yet to mend, Bucky means it. He means every cracking bit of it.

Steve stays the next time Nat comes over. She gives him one glance, and Bucky another—probably seeing the almost smile on Bucky’s face, and the embarrassment written all over Steve’s own, and just grins at them. Steve hands her a controller, and she settles down on the other side of Bucky, nudging him a little with her hip. She says something in Russian, still grinning, and Bucky mutters something back, also in Russian, looking heavily embarrassed. But he doesn’t hold back his smile when she presses a kiss to his forehead with another soft word.

Steve coughs slightly. “Ready to get trounced?” he says and Natasha laughs.

“I’d like to see you try, Rogers,” she says, and starts the game.

“Watch out, Steve’s been practicing.” Bucky presses his leg against Steve’s and Steve looks over at him.

Bucky’s smiling, a soft, contented thing and it fills Steve’s heart with joy.

“Alright, lovebirds,” Nat says, and Steve feels the heat creeping up his neck. “Get your heads in the game.”

“Let’s kick her ass,” Bucky says.

Steve smiles and they do just that.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/nellerific) and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/akingofinfinitespace) if you're there!


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